project 1980 Austin Princess - Replacing a Whole Sill

[vulgalour]

The other day Pat helped me get the Princess up on an axle stand.  Today I got to work with my new finger sander and discovered things.  What was a small structural repair has become a small complicated structural repair and is going to be best done by removing the rear axle.  This is rather more involved than expected.  At least removing the axle just means undoing four bolts and the handbrake cable so it's not too bad, and I can clean up the axle while it's off the car.  Might also drop the fuel tank and do everything I can get to all in one go, might as well.  Catch everything while it's small and doable sort of thing.

[vulgalour]

 

Had all these loose ends of content that I couldn't turn into a single video on their own, so just chucked them all into a video together.

[vulgalour]

There's a problem with the earth.
 

 

[SilverMachine]

6 hours ago, vulgalour said:

There's a problem with the earth.
 

 

its infested with people?

oh you mean electrical earth, cool, im sure the bellhousing is probably the correct location for the connection, also how old is the lion battery? have one in the fusion - im sure its 15+ and is still going strong!

also as a bit of a preventative measure is it worth adding a semi chunky earth (chunkier than the throttle cable housing) between the block and pedal box? i know you shouldnt need it now but im going belt braces and sock suspenders!

re previous video dose donkey have a zombie alter ego - for halloween? 

 

[vulgalour]

Not sure on the age of that Lion battery tbh, it's definitely getting on a bit but seems happy enough to continue batterying.  The problem with an extra earth on the pedal box is that doesn't take the throttle cable route out of the equation since to get to the pedal box it has to go through that cable.  Instead, there's that extra earth from the battery to the inner wing which, with the new battery cables, seems to be working just fine now happily.

15 hours ago, SilverMachine said:

re previous video dose donkey have a zombie alter ego - for halloween? 

 

Bit late for this year, certainly an idea for next year.  A pinata costume might be a better option since those are traditionally donkeys, I just don't want people to beat me with sticks to get sweets out of me!

 

[SilverMachine]

2 hours ago, vulgalour said:

A pinata costume might be a better option since those are traditionally donkeys, I just don't want people to beat me with sticks to get sweets out of me!

thats a good point!  maybe keep sweeties easily to throw out to the hoardes of demons....

[vulgalour]

Time to cover up all those exposed wires in the boot with what I've got to hand.

 

[dozeydustman]

I really need to catch up on your channel shenanigans Angyl. I have a few days off work so I may have another Lanchester binge!

And also good to see you and Pat are back together.

[vulgalour]

It's all worked out nicely hasn't it?  Plenty of Lanchester stuff to enjoy and from the comments from one viewer it turns out it was a really good idea to document dismantling the donor car so they have points of reference for their own LD10.

[vulgalour]

Video in which we investigate some sill rot and, somehow, weld near an unseen fuel leak without exploding.

[PhilA]

You reminded me with this the other week. The ground on the Chieftain is primarily the chassis; I looked and there was no heavy duty connection between the chassis and the body. The main engine ground went to the inner wing, which seems OK until you factor in that is only bolted to the body. 

The body is bolted to the chassis via isolators, so the ground path for the engine was via a detachable part of the body, which was connected to the main body tub which was grounded with a heavy wire to... The engine. I didn't think that one through well. 

Now the chassis connects to the engine, the engine also has a heavy wire to the body. Improvement. 

Well done on making the Princess better. It's surprising sometimes how going a little overboard can help long term.

[vulgalour]

I didn't explode, obviously.  So let's sort out this fuel leak issue so I can finish repairing that sill.

 

This all happened quite some time ago, the Princess videos are still two house moves behind real time, I'm gradually chugging through as my upload schedule permits.

[vulgalour]

Video day again.  Time for some lighting upgrade on the Princess.  One mistake made was having the inner headlights staying on with dipped beam, easily fixed by just unplugging them, and will be fixed more properly when I install the relay kit etc. later this year.

 

[vulgalour]

Video day again so let's go back to last year when it was my sole transport and I needed to weld some holes up in the floor without disabling the car.  It's at moments like this you get an appreciation for why newspaper and filler was the order of the day in the past...

 

[vulgalour]

It's the return of an old fashioned words-and-pictures post, hurrah!  I had to trawl back quite a way to find out where I'd got to and it's this one, Video 22.

Princess was playing up a bit, behaving like it had blown the head gasket and going through a bit more oil than usual.  First up, check the plugs and compression and see what that tells us.

Cylinder 1 (timing belt end) was returning reasonable compression and the spark plug didn't look too bad.

Cylinder two could be the culprit, if the head gasket is blown, because it's only returning about 75psi, which isn't a lot.  The spark plug looks much the same.

However, because of the way the distributor is fitted to the O Series engine in front wheel drive application, it can be very difficult to get the compression tester seated properly in the hole.

Cylinder three has plenty of compression and again, the plug looks about the same as the others, if slightly damp for some reason.

Finally, cylinder 4 which has slightly less compression and a plug that again, looks pretty much the same as the others.

On re-checking cylinder 2, I got a better seal and a much better reading.

It may have been running a bit lean, the plugs are quite white, and while the threads are oily that's always been the case with this car, especially on cylinder 2 which has a chronic oil weep issue due to the poor o-ring sealing method used for the distributor where it goes into the head.  The results from the compression test are pretty healthy:

• 1 - 145psi
• 2 - 140psi
• 3 - 150psi
• 4 - 135psi

That pretty much rules out head gasket failure, the figures are close enough together that there's no glaring issue there and while not as good as it could be, it's totally respectable for an engine of this age and mileage (I'm moderately certain it's done more miles than it says it has on the odometer, I just have no proof either way beyond the general condition of the car and the 'restoration' it got in the 90s).  Another reason I'd thought it might be hgf is that the coolant level was often very low and the expansion bottle always looked pretty unpleasant inside.  The coolant itself, despite appearances in this photo, was very clean when I was doing the testing which is odd because it was pretty sludgey looking before the test drive and somehow cleared up all by itself.  I was also getting bubbles in the coolant before the engine had got up to temperature, a sign that would suggest hgf, but as you can see from the results above, that seems pretty unlikely to be the cause.

Started the car up to test it and was thinking about things like the oil consumption.  At an estimate, I'd put a whole litre in over the course of about 400 miles, that's excessive and it had to be going somewhere.  This was after having done the head gasket not too long ago, so this was all after doing fresh fluids and such so it *could* be that things were flushing air out or that sort of thing and it's just one of those things.  I kept a regular eye on everything which is why I was aware of the oddities and aside from the disappearing fluids and mystery bubbles, it was actually doing fine for the 400 miles travelled.

Because I was unable to find any problems to fix, I just opted to keep using the car.  Bit difficult to fix something that literally isn't broken.  One thing I needed to sort out was the tyres, I'd had a puncture and was short on cash and time so got some part worns fitted at short notice at a local outfit who did treat the car with respect which is always welcome, and used the uggadugga set to KwikFit, giving me a bit of a problem. It was so tight I couldn't undo the wheel nuts on either side of the car, even with a breaker bar, and couldn't pull the handbrake on hard enough to stop it rolling.  Absolutely insane.  I didn't have anyone or anything to stand on the foot brake for me at the time, although I'm not sure it would have done much good anyway.  I resorted to chocking the wheel with my spare wheels with the new tyres fitted to try and stop the car rolling.

Even with my full, at the time 13st and a bit, on the breaker bar, and the wheel chocked, and the handbrake on full, it took the breaker bar visibly bending before I got the first wheel nut to crack off.  I was glad I was doing this at home, if I'd had another puncture and tried to sort it at the side of the road I would have been stuffed. The other side was just as bad.  I had gravity helping a little bit, our drive slopes just enough that I'm fighting the weight of the car.  Still, there's no need for a breaker bar to bend this much when trying to undo a wheel nut!  That's not a trick of the camera lens either, it really was bending enough that I was concerned I was going to snap the head of the bar.

At least swapping the new wheels on was much less arduous and the car was ready to roll again after far more effort than it should have been!  You can tell how long ago this was too by the in-between paint scheme we're sporting, it was the summer of 2023.

[Angrydicky]

Thanks for the update.

My O series Princess is much the same, sludgy coolant, high oil consumption, and it's also leaking oil from the head gasket at each end. 

I think the oil consumption is more down to leaks rather than being burnt, as it doesn't smoke and doesn't smell of burnt oil.

I did buy a head set for it ages ago when one came up cheap on ebay, but it's been put on the back burner. I remember all the problems you have had with your head over the years so I don't want to pull it apart until I absolutely have to! I have never done a compression test on it but the engine feels sweet enough so they can't be far out.

[Westbay]

If it ain't broke don't fix it ! 😇

[vulgalour]

Speaking of head work, here's a Princess engine video doing a job I hate doing because it involves two of my least favourite things: engines and maths.

 

[vulgalour]

Another words-and-pictures instalment for you, this time all the way back to April 2022 when I was preparing the Princess for MoT.

The car is exempt because of its age, so an MoT isn't vital, it's just nice to have someone have a look at things.  Booked the MoT on a whim because I thought everything was fine and that was when the Princess decided it should argue with me about that by breaking something all on its own.  First up, deal with some 'sharp edges' by taping over some problem areas as a temporary solution, this wheel arch in particular has been repaired at least once by me and the rust bubbling through is only going to be fixed by replacing the lip with fresh steel really.

On the way home from the garage, caught the reflection of the car and noticed the side repeater had stopped working.  This is a theme with this car, the design isn't great on these side repeaters and they don't do a very good job of keeping moisture out, as you can see.

Additionally, the fog light stopped working, because of course it did.  I'm using a red bulb in the inner light cluster on the driver's side, which I believe would originally have been a reverse light on the Galaxie they came from.

Another problem was that the front indicators weren't looking very orange, they are orange bulbs but have faded so they look rather too white.  The Princess isn't old enough to get away with white indicators, so we'll have to sort that out before the MoT.

Also learned when someone pulled out on me without warning that my horn had stopped working, so that's another MoT issue.  Turned out it was just the connectors on the bottom of the compressor were a bit crusty, so cleaned those up and all was well again.  Obviously I run air horns, you'd expect nothing less.

After testing the horn (that's a video one, I can't really show you a photo of noise) I made sure my dashboard telltales were all working, and they were.  The indicator telltale bulb holder has a habit of falling out of its socket, and of course it had done that on the recording day so that was a fun job of feeding my hands behind the dash to put it back in again without dislodging anything else.

Another thing that broke on the way back from booking the MoT was my speedo.  It chose that particular moment to break the plastic connector which has been a bit of a theme over the years.  The car came to me with a broken speedo cable way back in 2012 and I've replaced it a couple of times as the plastic on replacements has gone brittle and broken up.  Fortunately the cable is identical for all years of Princess so at the moment at least, parts availability has been okay on that one.

With that installed and the speedo working again, it was time to investigate the fog light.  I got it to work once and then it wasn't behaving so it looks like that's a switch issue.  The switches on the Princess are not the greatest for connectivity, it's a pretty fragile set up where the switches are installed and difficult to get in at them to investigate.  So let's fiddle about and get this out to see if we can troubleshoot it.

I took the rear light lens off to see if the bulb was at fault, it wasn't, and all I got out of anything was this.

I took the fuse out, found that it was okay, reassembled that, dismantled and re-greased the fog light switch, generally fiddled about with all the possible issues, moved the fuse holder and then for whatever reason it just started working again.

Well, that was easy I guess?  Back to the indicator issue, I got the new amber bulbs out ready to fit and discovered that once again, I'd ordered the wrong ones.  An alternative solution was required because I was finding it weirdly difficult to find MG B appropriate bulbs in amber.

Easiest fix was just to refit the old amber lenses instead of the clear ones.  Doesn't matter how faded the bulbs are that way and now I have orange indicators again... well, except for that one recalcitrant side repeater.

The Princess is old enough to not legally require side repeaters and since I fitted a solid state flasher relay I don't need to worry about how many bulbs are or aren't fitted affecting my flash rate.  the simplest solution was to simply disconnect them and remove them from the car.  Can't test it if it's not fitted!

That was as far as I got on the prep for the MoT.  The car was all ready to go... and it never made it to the MoT.  Life would throw a number of disasters at me that would prevent me from getting things sorted out, my mileage would be small enough in mileage that the car never became dangerous, and we just lurched on as best we could with the Princess being my trusty if battered steed for quite some time.  That was, once I'd sorted out the ridiculous brake issues but more on that in another update.

[JeeExEll]

Vulg this car is ongoing art.

[vulgalour]

Now it's time for one of the biggest jobs I ended up doing which shouldn't have been the battle it was; the rear brakes. The full video can be found here:

I'd noticed a weird knocking noise when braking, and I'd had several MoTs with 'brake imbalance on rear axle' which I'd never been able to resolve.  Something wasn't right and I was finally at a point I could investigate.  First job was to check the rear brake hoses which, predictably, looked like they were fresh from the Titanic.  I couldn't get anything to undo and didn't have any tools for making new brake lines so opted to douse everything in penetrating fluid while I worked out what to do next.  We started out bad, and it was only going to get worse.

Next job was to release the rear drum.  I already had the car up on an axle stand and the wheel removed, so now I could work on prying the dust cap off so I could get to the castle nut and split pin that lived behind it.

Worth noting that the hub nuts on the back are right and left handed thread, depending which side of the car you're on, and it's a 24mm nut. Undo that and remove the big washer from behind it, a magnet on a stick is very useful for this.

You don't have to remove the wheel bearing, that can stay inside the drum which should just slide off.  This isn't the first time I've had these rear brakes apart so I know they can sometimes be a bit difficult, as drums are wont to be, but I was finding this one much more difficult that it should be.  Even though the wheel span quite freely, I could not get the drum to pull off easily and, in the attempt of prying it off, managed to damage the shoe within a little bit which you can see here.

I don't have the special tool for pulling the drum, and I didn't have the means to fabricobble one together, so I was making do with whatever I had available to try and get this drum to let go.

Fortunately persistence paid off and I managed to wiggle everything just so and get the drum to release.  Pulling the drum off I got my first look at the shoes and things were immediately a little less than new looking inside.

The trailing shoe has seen a huge amount of wear, almost gone completely on the lower quarter, and you can see here that the cup washer for the retaining pin for the leading shoe is awol, with the spring for it resting behind the trailing shoe.  It's very likely that's my mystery knock and one has to wonder how long it's been that way since that's also likely the reason for the uneven shoe wear.  I definitely got about as much wear as it was possible to get out of the trailing shoe at least and somehow got away without damaging the inner face of the drum.

Donkey's years ago, @Mr_Bo11ox gave me a set of rear shoes on a rainy day in Derby (it's funny what you remember), and I was about to finally put them to use.  That's why it's not hoarding.  Unfortunately that's the only brake hardware I did have and the Princess is a surprisingly difficult car to get the correct springs and such for, it doesn't seem to share this model of rear drum with anything else which I find baffling and would love to be proven wrong.  8 years before recording the video so probably nearer 10 years as I post this, we were having trouble sourcing springs and had to use something from another British car that was a close match so the hardware in here isn't 40 years old at least and should be good to go a little bit longer.  Fortunately the shoe retaining pins etc. are at least a standard component, it's the springs that are the challenge.  These are what I ended up with.

With everything photographed I then stripped it all down ready for reassembly.  It was all very dry and dusty in there as is to be expected and I wanted to be sure there were no other nasty surprises waiting for me here.

It was just as well I did that too because what I found next was a real problem.  There was a big crack caused by rust on the backing plate and that was a part I'd never seen for sale.  I could still get the outer drum used, and even new (if the supplier's site was to be believed), but not the backing plate.  I assumed at this point that the wheel cylinder was fine, and decided I would be replacing it anyway since everything else was in need of work back here so I might as well.

Nothing I can do about that for now, so let's check my old springs against my new ones and see where the problems are.  The closest match I could find anywhere was from a Jensen Healey, which uses the same sized Girling rear drums, just in a rear wheel drive application rather than a front wheel drive application.  I had expected Maxi rear drums to be the same but no, those are different, as are Allegro, Mini, 1100, etc.  The brake hardware kit I got was a gamble, and I was pretty desperate at this point, so I spent £60 on it which is frankly too much.

I needed some good fortune with this job so I made my own luck and instead of fighting with the rear brake hose I just cut through it.  This meant I could actually unscrew the fixings and even the hard line and rear wheel cylinder!  Nice to have one win at least.

The fact the bleed nipple cap was still on and the bleed nipple itself unscrewed absolutely blew my tiny little mind.  To remove the wheel cylinder on the Princess you have to remove the bleed nipple, because of the way it is, and that can be a right old war.

There's a special bent E clip that holds the cylinder tight to the backing plate and that part is at least shared with other BL stuff, specifically classic Mini, so it's really easy to get hold of which was just as well as mine was incredibly crusty.  Then I got another stroke of luck in that I found someone selling the backing plates on eBay which meant one of the hardest parts to sort out was now hopefully not a concern.  Then in trying to remove the handbrake cable the ferrule just disintegrated so that meant I now had to remove the rear seat because that's where you access the rear handbrake cables.  Luckily the rear seat base is held in with just one nut in the centre and then pulls out.  Directly behind that fixing is the split where the cable from the handle splits into the two cables that serve the rear drums.

It's easier to see with the rear seat removed.  There's an adjuster for taking up or giving slack, and a metal bracket that serves as a sort of balancing pivot for the rear cables.  You have to remove the tension from the cable first so that you can free off the rear cables by unhooking them from that central bracket, and then you can pull the cable through the hole in the bodywork.  The benefit here is that the adjuster never gets super crusty since it's inside the car and well protected.  I have never successfully fully adjusted the rear brakes on this car no matter what I've tried, and neither has anyone else.

There's a little clip you can just see that locks the cable guide in place, once that's removed you can then slide the handbrake cable to the outside of the car.  Refitting is the reverse and just as irritating.  On the outside of the car the access is predictably not great and looks like this.

With that and everything else disconnected I could finally undo the three nuts and washers holding the backing plate to the rear hub and get ready to install new things.

In readiness for the new backing plates, I spent some time cleaning everything up, knocking off the crust that had built up, and getting it all ready for some fresh paint.  The trailing arms are cast iron (or steel maybe?) so rust is common and also not really an issue.

With all of that rust treated and painted, I could move on to the exciting delivery of new (to me) rear brake backing plates.  I was so fortunate to have found these, I hadn't salvaged them from any of the breakers I'd got parts from over the years because it wasn't a part I knew I'd ever need, nobody had really asked for one that I was aware of, everything just worked out in my favour that there happened to be a pair at a not silly price on eBay just when I needed them.  Really nice seller too, which is always a bonus.  These were in excellent shape too, most of the original black paint still on them.  Interestingly that groove you see is also on my original backing plates so that just seems to be a Princess thing.

I got straight on with the paint.  It was a Bank Holiday so I couldn't go out and get any fresh paint so just used what I'd got in at the time, which is how the Princess ended up with a silver rear brake.  Rust treater, primer, silver paint, and clear lacquer to complete the job, all fresh out of the rattle can.

Before reassembling what I'd got, I painted the surface the backing plate mounted to and gave it the barest smear of grease to try and keep the rust at bay, hopefully this will stop moisture building up in this sandwich and help things to last a bit longer.  The last thing I wanted to remove before refitting that was the brake hose.  The only bit to undo was where it met the hard line under the boot floor.  Unfortunately, this is where I'd learn there was no way this was coming undone without a fight, and fights like this are always won with the angle grinder.

It did get a bit toasty in the process.  I always manage to forget that brake fluid can be a bit like that.  I had hoped I would then be able to simply unscrew the remains of the brake hose from the ferrule on the hard line.  This would be the start of yet another saga where I was trying my best to save the hard line because I didn't have the tools to make a new one or re-flare this one and cash, as always, was very tight.  I'd already given myself some more work by cutting through the mounting bracket in the removal process, and twisting the bracket a little bit, threatening to pull it off the floor.  Not a pleasant job at all, I don't think even doing it indoors on a lift would have made it any nicer.  Look at the state of this.

With the benefit of hindsight I know it was futile fighting with it.  Unfortunately, past me didn't have that benefit and would persist in a future episode.  Let's end this update on a better note, look at my glorious silver brake backing plate all ready to receive nice new shiny parts.

[Rocket88]

Blimey… what a war!

[vulgalour]

Video day over on Youtube so it's time to drop that here for you all.  In this episode I replace a disintegrating jacking point with a custom scratch built one since it's a part you cannot buy from anyone for the Princess.

 

I've got 11 videos in the write-up queue for Princess forum updates and I will continue to work my way through those until we're caught up.

[vulgalour]

Austin Princess rear brake palaver, part the second.

With the new-to-me parts all freshened up I could start installing things back on the car.  The three nuts that hold the back plate to the trailing arm were bolted up and then the handbrake cable threaded back home.  I had to get Pat to help me with that because my arms weren't long enough to hold the cable and push the retaining clip home inside the car, I'm not sure anybody's arms are that long in fact.

Then I made my first mistake, though I didn't know it at the time, by refitting the old brake cylinder which appeared to be perfectly fine.  I hadn't been able to remove the hard line without risk of destroying it so instead opted to hit all the bare steel bits with rust converter to try and stave off any further corrosion and then installed it by carefully threading the hard line through the fitting hole first so I could get the rest of the cylinder seated on the back plate.  I had remembered to remove the bleed nipple which amazingly did come undone, and that's a necessary step because you cannot fit the cylinder with the bleed nipple installed as it won't physically fit.

The small hole you see next to the larger inverted keyhole is for a locating dowel on the brake cylinder.  It seems this is not always in the same place, on Ambassador ones it's sometimes on a different corner, or not there at all, so I imagine there were some revisions to this over the course of production.  The cylinder pushes into place quite firmly so you know when it's seated properly as it will just hold itself in place.

From the back, thanks in part to the silver I used, you can see moderately clearly how everything sits.  There's a large bent E clip that locks everything in place that I'll fit later, this one that was on there wasn't in great condition.  At the time of recording I didn't know it was the same as classic Mini for this component (the cylinder isn't the same as classic Mini, unfortunately) so believed I'd have to order something special to sort it out.  The hard line runs up to a bracket that's cast as part of the trailing arm which then connects to a flexi line and runs up to the bracket on the boot floor.

Next was to figure out what I could and couldn't use from the old brakes, the new spring set, and the replacement shoes I had so that I could build a functional rear brake again.  Don't you just love doing drum brakes?  The Princess hubcap is pretty handy for keeping all the bits together though, so that's nice.

Now you'll notice the Ferodo box of brake shoes there.  I'm not sure where these came from but it turns out they've been used before.  They'll do in a pinch, there's still meat left on the shoes and they appear to be in reasonable condition but since I had a new set as mentioned in the previous write up I opted to go for those instead as they're brand new (old stock) and usually the MoProd stuff in the red and yellow packaging is pretty good quality when I've fitted it to this car.  They're done to the old recipe too.

When it comes to the rear brakes on the Princess there is a bit of a problem.  You can still get the outer drum, the shoe retaining hardware (this is pretty universal for drum brakes), the wheel cylinders (although that's not as easy as it was), and that's it.  You can't get the backing plates or the brake shoes springs at all, I got very lucky finding the second hand set of back plates online.  After a lot of online hunting, and this was pre-AI slop era so it wasn't as difficult as it is now, I managed to settle on a set of Jensen Healey Mk2 springs which were the closest match I could find.  Trying to find good pictures and measurements of the springs themselves was very difficult too.  The spring set supply being poor was an issue a decade ago when I did this job, it's even harder now.  In the photo above you can see the new shoes on the right with the Jensen spring set, and the old shoes on the left with the Princess spring set, they're really very close, but are they close enough?

Well one thing wasn't, which is the shoe retaining pins.  The pins that came in the Jensen kit are too short for the Princess so instead I got some that were listed for generic 1980s Ford application, and no, I couldn't find a Ford spring set that matched what's on the Princess so no joy there when I was hunting.  The Princess needs a 42mm long retaining pin.

The other thing I didn't have at this point was new E clips to transfer the bars from the old shoes to the new ones, so I had to re-use the old ones in the meantime just to get things back together and once the new clips arrive I would then swap those over.  The adjuster and handbrake bars are another item that's not available but given they're just chunks of shaped steel they can't really go that wrong aside from perhaps the adjuster notches wearing out.  First one I swapped over was the adjuster bracket, this is the back of the leading shoe.

For the other shoe you need to attach the handbrake bar, with the slot for the handbrake cable to the top.  This bar also goes on the back of the shoe.

With the bars fitted, and the handbrake cable threaded through that socket on the trailing shoe, you can then put both shoes in place by locating them in the slotted pushers on the wheel cylinder and the guides at the top of the backing plate.

With those loosely in place you then need to fit the lower bar, hooking it into the leading shoe first so that it can rest in the slot on the trailing shoe.

Then I tried to fit the spring set.  I did take a photo so I had a point of reference from before anything was dismantled and that would really help figure out which springs went where.  There isn't a great deal of information out there on doing this job and diagrams never really look the same as real components when they're in front of you like this.  I also wasn't sure that the Jensen spring set would even fit as they weren't an exact match.  The first spring I got in bore that out too, it looks far too stretched compared to the original and I don't want to be messing up the balance of this by having the wrong springs in there.

The old spring was scruffy looking but not weak visibly anywhere so I decided it better to use that than the new one.  Then it was a case of figuring out how best to angle the shoes and try and keep everything together without it all springing apart, literally, and leading to me having a rage tantrum.  Luckily, it cooperated much better than expected.  If you want to see exactly how I did it watch the video at the top of this post to see me struggle in real time.

Then it was a case of fighting with the shoe retaining springs and pins to get it all seated and I noticed that one of the bottom springs looked to be in upside down.  I didn't have time to correct that in the moment so I had to put it all away for now and deploy some plastic bag technology to try and keep the weather out until I could get back on this.

Then I hit a new problem.  The new shoes were so much thicker than the old ones that came off I couldn't get the outer drum to go over them.  What I'd forgotten to do was get a C clamp on the wheel cylinder to compress it down to its smallest setting which, had I done that, might have highlighted a problem I didn't know about yet.  Not to worry, I needed to pull things apart to fit some new E clips anyway, I just wanted to get the car off the axle stand and back on its wheels, something that wasn't going to be an option on this day of recording.

A little while later I had some fresh tools to play with to try and solve some other problems, namely the fixing on the end of the brake hard line that was attached car side that I really wanted to try and save because I didn't have any brake line making tools and didn't want to buy those if the easy-outs were going to actually do the trick of removing the nubbin of the flexi hose screw thread that was seized into the hard line nut.  This was a great idea in theory, until I got the easy out stuck in the flexi line nubbin and found out that the chuck on the drill I was using couldn't grip the easy out hard enough to do more than spin on the shank.  Typical.  With the assistance of a pair of mole grips and a spanner I did free the easy out at least and then changed to something easier.

Okay, so let's just dismantle the drums again so I can put that spring in the right way around and replace those E clips.  I bought myself an assorted box since I wasn't sure which size I needed and surely a whole box of them is going to have what I want in there, right?  Wrong!  Every single one was the wrong size being either too big or too small.  The new E clips I ordered for the brake cylinder were at least the correct size but I didn't know they were supposed to be curved (I'd not learned about classic Mini compatability yet) so that also didn't help other than to give me lots of E clips for the future.  The replacement proper curved E clips that I then ordered I managed to Put Somewhere Safe and could not find them anywhere.  The one win I did have is the C clamps I got did at least fit the wheel cylinder so in theory I could compress that and rebuild everything.

To add to the comedy of errors that this job had now become, on the suggestions variously given, I got myself a little blowtorch to get that hardline fitting nice and hot so it would release its grip.  Nothing wrong with the blowtorch, happily, the problem was every single source of ignition I tried to light it with got blown out before it reached the blowtorch!  It was just going to be one of those days.  Rather than throwing everything in a pile in disgust, I opted to rebuild the brake drum yet again and found that the C clamps actually came in handy after compressing the wheel cylinder because I could use them as a third hand to hold the shoes in place while I fitted the springs.  This was a very welcome little discovery on what had been a very frustrating day.

There was a concern though, and one which at the time I wasn't really sure of the reason for.  When I compressed the wheel cylinder a lot of rubber black goo came out of it.  There was a certain amount of foreshadowing to be had there.  On the plus side, I did get the drum refitted, and some fresh grease where needed, so that felt like a win of sorts.

Once it was pushed home I could get the washer and castle nut in and push a new cotter pin into place.  I didn't bend the legs because I was sure I'd be in here again, it was positioned more so I'd remember to do it when things went back together a final time.  I really was not looking forward to getting back to this job, and with good reason given the grief it had given me thus far.

 

[SilverMachine]

superb tinkering as usual, im behind on videos though so apologies! 

[vulgalour]

That's okay, there's a LOT of videos at this point!

[vulgalour]

Speaking of, here's another one!  This time I'm replacing the whole outer sill before starting a new job while suffering from the worst hayfever I think I've ever had.